Here’s a guest post from T and Ku (Teresa and Sue), the Journey Junkies. See how they Sold All Their Stuff, escaped the rat race and embraced their passion for travel. They used a lot of the sites mentioned in the Sell All Your Stuff and Move Abroad e-book too!
ESCAPING THE RAT RACE
By the Journey Junkies
Leaving It All Behind!
The months before we gave up our flat to take off on our big adventure, were filled with finding ways to sell/distribute/give away our stuff.
About a year prior to leaving, we started to sell CD’s, DVD’s and books on Ebay, Amazon and Magpie. We put a few on every week to make it manageable, and our Sundays were spent packing, weighing and addressing parcels to be sent out. We also did regular boot sales. It was a perfect way to make some extra cash to add to the travel fund.
Closer to our date of departure, we gave our fridge and washing machine away on Gumtree. They were both gone within an hour of placing the ads!
Some friends kindly took a couple of our (very large) favourite pictures to take care of and they are hanging on their walls to this day (not sure if we will get them back!)
Various miscellaneous items were taken to charity shops.
On our final weekend, we had a big party, where many of our friends left with a parting gift of a piece of furniture! Basically, everything found a home and nothing was thrown away.
At the end, our belongings consisted of a few boxes of travel books (including all those of our favourite writer Alastair Humphreys!) and some bags of clothes, all of which went into storage in Ku’s mum’s garage.
It was a delight to cancel our direct debits – electric, gas, council tax and the DVD club we belonged to. We even got a refund from the council! All that we were left with was a direct debit for our mobile phones, which we had decided to take with us.
Hurray – we were free! Life had suddenly become less complicated! All we had were the (day) packs on our backs – we were ready for an adventure!
Awesome story! I love the “leaving it all behind” intro too. It reminds me of the song that inspired me to also leave the rat-race; Gone by Pearl Jam. And don’t forget to follow the Journey Junkies adventures, they have some cool stuff – like their TOP 10 feature!
Now go sell all your stuff!